Display ad media (banners) are notoriously hard to measure especially if your strategy is an upper funnel one where clicks do not make sense as a KPI. Most banner ads seem to be about awareness or engagement in spite of that. Digital marketers should stick with proven ad research methods, e.g. brand lift studies or dig deeper into analytics using passive brand impact measurement like viewthrough. And of course there is always algorithmic attribution that can help.

A bigger threat to display media's viability is ad blocking, which prevents display ads and any associated tracking tags from being served up. Yes, that means no potential for viewthrough (or clickthrough) if there are no ads presented to the user.

In addition to the reduced page clutter (what most people seem to want),
ad blockers are also a good way to speed up your Web browsing
experience. Unfortunately, too many publishers do not use advanced tag management to reduce the strain put on browsers when 25-50-100 3rd party cookies and tags fire in the browser.

According to eMarketer
this is going to be a 25% de facto tax on publisher audiences. Some are
however, asking users to shut off their ad blockers when visiting their site. Here is the official word from the IAB on ad blocking.

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About the VMC

Viewthrough.org is the home of the Viewthrough Measurement Consortium, an ad hoc collaboration between among digital ad industry/analytics professionals seeking to improve the understanding of this important digital advertising metric.